reconstituting the utopian vision of making: hci after

Reconstituting the Utopian Vision of Making: HCI After Technosolutionism

Silvia Lindtner University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, USA [email protected]

Shaowen Bardzell Indiana University Bloomington, USA [email protected]

Jeffrey Bardzell Indiana University Bloomington, USA

[email protected]

ABSTRACT HCI research has both endorsed “making” for its innovation and democratization capacity and critiqued its underlying technosolutionism, i.e., the idea that technology provides solutions to complex social problems. This paper offers a reflexive-interventionist approach that simultaneously takes seriously the critiques of making’s claims as technosolu-tionist while also embracing its utopian project as worth reconstituting in broader sociopolitical terms. It applies anthropological theory of the global and feminist-utopianism to the analysis of findings from research on making cultures in Taiwan and China. More specifically, the paper provides ethnographic snippets of utopian glim-mers in order to speculatively imagine and explore alterna-tive futures of making worth pursuing, and in so doing re-constitute the utopian vision of making.

Author Keywords Making; maker movement; DIY; innovation; neoliberalism; capitalism; utopianism; policy; HCI; China; Taiwan.

ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.

INTRODUCTION In recent years, a collection of emerging technologies and practices has co-evolved into what is now often referred to as “making,” or “the maker movement.” Hailed in the me-dia as the contemporary site of technological innovation and as a revamp of economies and broken educational sys-tems, making is promoted as having diverse potential bene-fits for society. What was largely understood as a hobbyist movement, associated with the early hackerspaces in the 1990s in Europe and the founding of Arduino in 2006 [20], has over the last 10 years transformed into an aspiring in-terdisciplinary arena of social computing [2,10,48].

Making is often articulated in utopian terms; it is envi-sioned to democratize technology production. Through the transformation of the self, empowered by the tools of pro-duction, making will have broad social, economic, and po-litical impacts, so the story as portrayed by advocates of the maker movement often goes, e.g., [3]. This largely utopian vision of making has already had impact as the growing number of investments in maker-related activities, projects, events, and spaces evidence [19, 48]. The rapid transfor-mation of making from the fringes to the mainstream has been in part enabled by the financial and/or political sup-port of large corporations including Intel, Qualcomm, Mi-crosoft, Ford; by educational institutions ranging from local libraries to American ivy league universities; and by city and national governmental entities including but not limited to the US White House, the US National Science Founda-tion, the Chinese national and local city governments, Sin-gapore, the Taipei city government and “creative industry policy” bureau, the European Union, and many more.

The HCI research community has shared this enthusiasm and expressed diverse interests in making. These include an interest in making as a new domain of computing [32,42, 48,60,77], which HCI can investigate to theorize interac-tion, to pursue new design methodologies, and to which HCI can contribute tools and infrastructure [7,14,16,21,35, 40,41,43,44,54,68,76]. HCI researchers have also explored the potentials of making to contribute towards a sustainable IT agenda [61]. One of the central interests that these di-verse projects share is making’s contribution to the democ-ratization of technology use and design. For instance, mak-ing is envisioned to move IT innovation out of university and corporate labs into everyday society [29,71]. Making is also seen as enabling marginalized groups to participate in computing innovation, including children [26,34], women [28,64] and people in the Global South [18].

At the same time, HCI research has also expressed skepti-cism towards some of these projects, suggesting that they are unrealistic or even naïve [1,2,10,25,28,37,39,47,60,61, 62,69,74]. This research suggests that there is a technosolutionism underlying making and much of the re-search on the topic. Technosolutionism is the view that technology can unilaterally solve difficult social problems. Technosolutionism is visible in promotions of making that portray it as furthering sustainability, social justice for women, economic development for the Global South, and empowerment for all. HCI research has also problematized

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(Re)understanding Making: A Critical Broadening of Maker Cultures #chi4good, CHI 2016, San Jose, CA, USA

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this view as it largely rests on the deployment of Western conceptions of democracy and empowerment to character-ize what is in fact a global phenomenon [17,37,39,40,46, 47,47,69].

Taken together, the utopian vision of making has been un-masked as resting on a kind of technosolutionism and ideo-logical colonialism, in a literature of critical studies in and beyond HCI that is hard to dismiss. Yet, the body of critical HCI scholarship on making has not replaced the techno-utopian vision with an equally aspirational vision. Thus, HCI researchers are in a dilemma. We can pursue making as an avenue to increase participation and democracy in technology use and design, if we take what has been criti-cized as a naïve technosolutionist stance. Or we can take a critical stance and thereby risk abdicating our agency in contributing towards making’s sociopolitical potentials.

This paper seeks to deconstruct this dilemma and to explore a way of pursuing making research that robustly pursues a democratizing agenda, while remaining technically, critical-ly, and empirically sophisticated. We argue that a methodo-logical blind spot has made it hard for HCI to pursue tech-nical and sociopolitical agendas simultaneously: common methodological stances tend to prioritize either the possibil-ities of technical innovations or careful sociopolitical cri-tique—but not both equally and at the same time. This is not to suggest a rigid binary between the utopian project of make and its critics. Rather, we acknowledge that both share a commitment to critical intervention and change, although each construes change and intervention different-ly. For instance, the utopian project of making is also a form of critique; it challenges perceived conceptions of computing and design (and who gets to do them), as is visi-ble, for instance, in Leah Buechley’s work [14,15,16]; and making’s project to democratize production is positioned to disrupt passive consumer culture, e.g., [71]. Similarly, criti-cal scholarship is also committed to a form of intervention. We propose to reconstitute the utopian vision of making to harmonize the interventionist and utopian impulses of the technical and critical agendas.

Reconstituting the Utopian Vision of Making We ask: how can we blend the contributions of technolo-gists who are opening up making to new uses and users with the contributions of more critical voices to pursue the democratization of making as an equally sociotechnical research practice? What is needed is both a technical and a sociopolitical perspective, because (obviously) democrati-zation itself is a sociopolitical issue, implicated in problems of hegemony and structural disenfranchisement. Technolog-ical innovations, such as new tools and kits, may well have democratizing potential, but realizing that potential is not merely a technical problem; it is also a sociopolitical one.

To summarize, this paper offers an attempt to pursue mak-ing’s democratizing potentials, by constructing and deploy-ing a perspective that is equally fluent in, and equally prior-itizes, technical and sociopolitical perspectives. We say

“attempt” because this project is bigger than any of us, let alone a single paper. Rather than seeing our contingent per-spective as a reason to shy away from our sociopolitical agency as researchers, we see it instead as a place to start. Throughout, we strive to maintain a critical sensibility to prevent devolving into cheerleading and fad-ism.

To do so, we adopt the reflexive-interventionist approach of feminist utopianism [12] and speculative sociology [45] as developed by Shaowen Bardzell [6,8]. Specifically, we pro-pose a double move to outline how HCI can begin such a reflexive-interventionist approach. The first move consti-tutes a critique of the present to reveal both problem spots and opportunities for intervention as well as practices, spaces or moments where alternatives to dominating modes are revealed. We deploy the concept of “global assemblag-es” in order to analyze making on both levels (technological and sociopolitical), without normalizing making in Western terms. The second move is rooted in our critique of the pre-sent; in it, we employ an anticipatory design approach to move forward. Anticipatory design is an approach from feminist philosophy and speculative sociology [6,8,12,45] that is reconstructive, working with fragments as raw mate-rials out of which to speculatively imagine and explore al-ternative futures worth pursuing (which is what makes this activity “utopian”). Anticipatory design provides models and tactics to pursue ambitious social goals of making in a pragmatic and participative way.

In what follows, we provide a detailed explanation of the analytical commitments of each of these two moves. To articulate each, we draw from our extensive fieldwork on making in China and Taiwan. This includes many years of ethnographic research with diverse making cultures includ-ing but not limited to hobbyist makers, makerspaces, hard-ware entrepreneurs, policy makers, artists, designers, craft-ers, manufacturers, and more. Details of our methods and long-term work are documented here: [6,7,9,46,47,48,61, 74,79]. A central commitment in our ethnographic engage-ments in China and Taiwan has been the close collaboration with our interlocutors, including co-authorship and the host-ing of workshops aimed at bringing together hands-on mak-ing with critical intervention. Throughout, we continuously reflect on our own positionality in relation to our fieldsites, as described in [9,10,47,49]. For purposes of clarity, we first tackle critique of the present: making as global assem-blages and then turn to move 2 anticipatory design: utopian glimmers of making, with each section teasing out stories and aspects of making from our fieldwork as potential raw materials for a critique of the present and an anticipatory design practice. The written format forces a kind of se-quencing, which does not mean to suggest that the two moves necessarily have to occur in the order presented here. On the contrary, the two moves work hand-in-hand, unfold alongside one another in and through our empirical and analytical work. The double move is aimed at articulating a sensibility (rather than a firm recipe) for future research on making in HCI and cultures of production more broadly.


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The discussion brings the two moves together in order to reconstitute the utopian vision of making. Throughout this paper, we build on prior research on non-Western making [17,18,37,39,40,41,46,47,48,69,70,79] to continue decenter a predominantly Western narrative of making (and technol-ogy design writ large) by opening up alternatives and other possible futures.

MOVE 1: CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT Any critique of the present requires substantive empirical work informing us of the present. Reading and doing such empirical research critically implies taking seriously that making means different things across regions and is prac-ticed in relation to situated technological and cultural pro-cesses, while acknowledging that at the same time making can not be divorced from global processes of capital flows, investments, geopolitical tensions, and so on. Prior research has emphasized that much of the techno-utopian idealism and visions of democratization are articulated from a large-ly Western perspective [17,69,70]. Reframing democratiza-tion of technology as a sociopolitical problem thus benefits from a decentering of this Western-centric perspective. We also need a theoretical perspective to account for making in its sociopolitical and technomaterial complexities. We draw from a body of work in global anthropology. Specifically, we use the concept of “global assemblages” [58], which refers to a conceptual approach to understanding and ac-counting for emerging “material, collective, and discursive relationships” that are articulated as global forms [58]. Ex-amples of such forms, as collected in [58], include organ selling, bond trading, and DNA self-testing; to which list we would add making, as we explain in what follows be-low. These forms of life are global in the sense that they move across cultural situations (e.g., stem cell research as a global practice), and yet they are also locally enacted and performed (e.g., stem cell research in the US is legally and politically constrained in ways that such research is not elsewhere).

Key to this approach is the concept of “assemblage,” which according to [58] “is the product of multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic. The temporality of the assemblage is emergent…. As a composite concept, the term ‘global assemblage’ suggests inherent tensions: global implies broadly encompassing, seamless, and mobile; as-semblage implies heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, par-tial, and situated” (12, emphasis in original). In summary, global assemblages are emergent and heterogeneously composed forms of life situated both in local and global practices, materials, and discourses. Such an understanding counters the abstract and structural notion of a global uni-versal, replacing the latter with concrete little histories of situated forms of life as they participate in, are shaped by, and also do not relate to “the global.”

Making, we argue, is such a global assemblage. In other words, we do not see a single maker movement as a global universal with local instances. Rather, we examine in this

paper specific “ensembles of heterogeneous elements – the assemblages” [58] through which making and its signifi-cance is articulated and practiced. This becomes evident in the following two ways.

First, maker groups are spread across the globe, view them-selves as part of a global movement, and articulate values and practices using global networks, from wikis to globally disseminated maker franchises such as FabLab. Part of this phenomenon is the dissemination of ideas (e.g., “everyone can be a maker” and “making is a whole new paradigm of IT innovation”), which when widely disseminated, become global ideas that are interpreted and put into action in di-verse ways in particular sites and situations.

Second, making is linked to global capital, though its flows are socially, institutionally, and technologically concentrat-ed in contingent ways. For instance, making as start-up cul-ture has in part proliferated because of new channels such as crowdfunding, which remains predominantly accessible to a fairly elite network of technologists [2, 19]. Making also can’t be divorced from broader “techno-capitalist” pro-cesses such as the utilization of (free) user participation and open innovation as business model, e.g., companies that remained open source long enough to build up a robust product and user base and then switched to a proprietary model, e.g., MakerBot and 3DRobotics [20,25,47]. Making is simultaneously a symptom and a transformation of global processes of capitalism: while making feeds off of existing structures of power, it is also aimed at and specifically mo-tivated by democratizing technology production.

The “maker movement” is often presented as a global uni-versal, applying equally to Silicon Valley, Taipei, Chang-sha, and Windhoek. Ong and Collier’s [58] approach to “global assemblages” provides a means to problematize such a view by investigating the “petit recits” of particular locales as these ideas come into contact with praxis. This approach reveals that global practices such as making do not fit under a single definition but are better understood as sharing family resemblances. In perceiving the resem-blances, we can construct an account of the global form. But in perceiving the variations, which resist or fail to fit the unifying narrative, we can find alternative practices and potentials. In other words, viewing making as global as-semblages gives us the methodological and epistemological tools to account for heterogeneous aspects of making with-out losing sight of the fact that they are all “making.” The global assemblages approach provides tools to expand prior research with a reflexive program for the study of global processes of technology, e.g., [23,24,36,47,61,72,79], avoiding the binary between universals like globalization or innovation on the one hand and place-based struggles on the other. Instead, global assemblages replace the global universal with “petit recits” of situated forms of life through which the global is produced. We now continue by unpack-ing how the making practices we observed in China and Taiwan unfolded as global assemblages.


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Making in China as Global Assemblages Making as global assemblage in China figures in the fol-lowing key ways: 1) aspirations to position making, and with it China, as a key site in global networks of technology innovation and on par with Western innovation hubs like Silicon Valley; and 2) a wave of entrepreneurs, who turn their maker visions into commercial products by engaging with manufacturing in the South of China. We now articu-late how these two aspects of making as global assemblages come to the fore in China.

In 2012, China witnessed its first international maker event; the Maker Carnival. Since around 2010, a steadily growing number of open source hardware enthusiasts had come to-gether across a variety of Chinese cities. They had opened up maker and hackerspaces, organized local workshops and events, and written about their open source hardware pro-jects online. The 2012 Maker Carnival was intended not only to bring together makers from various places in China, but also to help legitimize and generate visibility for their efforts in international maker circles. The organizers, a group of makers in China, considered the event a success: while the Maker Carnival did not generate profit (on the contrary, its organizers contributed personal funds to make it happen), the event triggered significant international visi-bility. Mitch Altman, a key figure in the American hack-erspace scene, gave one of the keynote lectures, and 28 foreign makers received stipends to attend the event. The Maker Carnival was the first of many maker-related events to follow, culminating in two featured Maker Faires in Shenzhen in 2014 and 2015, drawing significant investment from the Chinese government and from international corpo-rations such as Intel, Qualcom, Microsoft, and Arduino.

Over the years, through maker events and the efforts of a continuously growing number of hackerspaces [46,48,50], China’s makers have carefully crafted a particular kind of image of making in China in relation to what many imagine to be a global maker movement. For instance, two of Chi-na’s most prominent open source hardware companies, Seeed Studio and DFRobot, sell the majority of their prod-ucts and services to individual makers, start-ups, education-al entities and hackerspaces in North America and Europe. Similarly, prominent hardware incubator programs like HAXLR8R and Highway1, while leveraging the manufac-turing ecosystem of the city of Shenzhen [47,49], are backed by European Venture Capitalists, and operate through a powerful network of start-ups, media relations, venture capitalists, and big corporates, many of which have ties into Silicon Valley. Alongside foreign venture capital-ists, Western tech media have joined in to promote Shen-zhen as the new “Silicon Valley for Hardware,” e.g., [4,13, 78]. In this imaginary of a global future, regions like Shen-zhen are portrayed as being modernized by the intercessions of ideas or practices of (predominantly Western) venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and designers, who move the region from “copycat culture to innovation” [78]. But this story of China’s transformation from “backwards” copy to

“international” innovation culture is problematic, which Shenzhen’s roots in alternative (not-Western centric) global assemblages make immediately visible. Let us briefly elab-orate.

As a special economic zone, Shenzhen was a key region during the West’s outsourcing boom [47] (see [56,57] for a detailed account of Shenzhen’s urbanization). Since the 1980s, many electronics manufacturing companies had set up shop in Shenzhen, the most well-known being the Tai-wanese companies Foxconn and HTC [33,52]. From the Apple iPhone to the Tablet sold at Wal-Mart, Shenzhen had become a key site in global end-consumer electronics pro-duction. However, over the last 20 years, the region has not only produced computers and mobile devices commis-sioned by corporations such as Apple, Nokia and HP, but has also begun develop its own lines of products, shipped to markets that had remained largely untapped by international tech firms: populations in Africa, India, Asia, South Ameri-ca unable to access and/or afford the international brands. This manufacturing practice is often described as shanzhai (⼭山寨) in Chinese, referring to a network of some thousand factories in the South of China, whose open sharing practic-es have enabled them to become competitive in global mar-kets [47]. The global assemblages of shanzhai production extend beyond the more familiar China-US-Europe triangle, and include other regions typically not associated with global tech innovation and original design.

In their theory of global assemblages, Ong and Collier sug-gest staying close to the practices that “rearticulate and re-assemble material, technical and discursive elements in the process of remaking particular contexts” [58]. Following this approach, we account here for the ways in which aspi-rations of China’s makers play out in both their material engagements with and their discursive construction of Shenzhen and shanzhai. China’s makers position China’s history and culture of manufacturing, especially as lived and practiced through shanzhai, key to the ideals of the maker movement; only if the global maker movement (and with it the West) took seriously Chinese manufacturing as equal partner in IT design and innovation, will the maker movement be able to accomplish its ideal to truly democra-tize technology production [46].

Making Assemblages in Taiwan The maker scene in Taiwan reflects its present political situation. Taiwan evolved to a multiparty democratic gov-ernment in the 1980s and 90s. Taiwan’s young democracy is situated in a complex history. The island itself was origi-nally peopled by aboriginals, but beginning in the 17th cen-tury saw immigrants from nearby China come to the island as well as a succession of foreign rulers: the Dutch, Span-ish, Chinese, and Japanese all occupied Taiwan from the 17th century through the 1940s. In 1949, the government of the Republic of China (ROC), having lost the Chinese Civil War to the communists, relocated to Taiwan. Today, citi-zens of Taiwan are politically divided between those seek-


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ing eventual reunion with China and those who wish to declare independence from China, though all view Tai-wan/ROC as a sovereign nation. For its part, China consid-ers Taiwan a renegade province and has made credible threats to invade it, if Taiwan does not submit to PRC rule.

In short, Taiwan has an ongoing project of self-identity—ROC vs. Taiwan, Chinese vs. Taiwanese, nation vs. prov-ince. But this project has urgency; people of Taiwan feel threatened that their way of life could disappear. This in-cludes the threats of the destruction of their liberal democ-racy by a Chinese invasion, Taiwan’s fading influence as it is politically and economically isolated from the rest of the world, internal divisions between a Chinese- vs. Taiwanese-identifying electorate, and the threat of distinctively Tai-wanese ways of life, rituals, and craft traditions dying out in the age of global entertainment media. Taiwan’s maker movement views the democratizing of making as a resource for pursuing the very existence of this society; that is, the democratization of computing in Taiwan is a proxy for a larger conversation about Taiwan itself.

Making is enmeshed in Taiwan’s creative and cultural in-dustry policy. This policy seeks to build on the economic significance of professionals operating in the overlapping creative (e.g., design, computing, advertising, media, etc.) and cultural (e.g., tourism, heritage, parks and recreation, museum, etc.) industries. In Taiwan, as in many other plac-es pursuing such policies, the goals are not merely econom-ic but they are also part of the project of forging a national identity. The policy seeks to construct a vision of Taiwan-ese culture that can drive the economy and also identify Taiwanese styles and products globally. It does so first by identifying distinctively Taiwanese creative industries (e.g., traditional Taiwanese crafters) and also industries where Taiwan is particularly strong (e.g., computer science and engineering); then this policy seeks to experimentally fuse these industries, in an attempt to cross-pollinate their re-spective strengths. For example, the government has hired design firms to engage with crafters in hopes of transition-ing crafts to exportable products [9]. More recently, it is supporting the maker movement as it combines fabrication, design, art, entrepreneurship, and hacking. In March 2015, the former Air Force Command Headquarters in Taipei City was transformed into a world-class “TAF [Taiwan Air Force] Innovation Base,” a co-working space for making-enabled entrepreneurship with substantial technical and economic support. However, the movement itself offers distinctly different visions for making’s role in Taiwan’s society, which we articulate through examples.

Taiwanese “puppet opera” (布袋戲) was originally a popu-lar form of street theater. This 200-year-old tradition can be seen everywhere in Taiwan, in streets and festivals, gov-ernment-sponsored cultural events, and in popular media. A typical performance includes elaborately decorated tradi-tional stage, stylized performance techniques, and hand-crafted wooden puppets. Puppeteers undergo extensive ap-

prenticeships in both performance and fabrication. Chen Bo-Jian (陳伯健) is a master in this tradition, and he is also well known in the Taipei maker scene. He has collaborated with FabLab Taipei, OpenLab Taipei and other maker groups to use 3D printing, laser cutting, and other emerging technologies to transform and update the painstaking fabri-cation of puppet opera stages and puppets, combining tradi-tional techniques and materials with new ones.

Chen also uses this work to make a strong political state-ment. In public presentations and interviews, Chen argues that “culture and creativity industry must exist to be in ser-vice of Taiwanese tradition, not the other way around.” Chen is not arguing against an entrepreneurial vision of making in favor of a hobbyist vision in which makers should be free to do what they like. He is more specifically rejecting the notion, pursued by the government through its creative and cultural industries policy, that Taiwanese arts, crafts, styles, and rituals should be pursued for their market potential. He argues instead that Taiwanese ways of life themselves are the highest goods, and that economic devel-opment is a tool to support them. His political enemy is not an external threat, such as that of the Chinese military, but an internal threat: the subjection of Taiwanese ways of life to global capitalism by well-intentioned bureaucrats. Chen’s political position is common among many (but not all) of the maker spaces in Taipei. They view the rise of making as an opportunity to perpetuate distinctively Tai-wanese forms of life into the future, and for such a project to be successful, making has to become a widespread cul-tural practice. This view provides a substantive basis for specific educational reform proposals, in which educational institutions are tasked with disseminating the Taiwanese cultural practice of making, as it disseminates Taiwan’s history, language and literature, and everyday skills such as arithmetic, writing, and civic participation.

Yet an alternative position is also prevalent in the Taipei maker scene. This view emphasizes making as key to inno-vation and entrepreneurship. For example, Taiwan’s gov-ernment has sponsored making-related innovation competi-tions, hackathons, and co-working spaces with the goal of cultivating the next generation of IT professionals. The government also supports major local, regional, and Asia-Pacific conferences such as COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) and the FabLab Asia Network Conference 2015, which featured participa-tion from over 80 labs located in 20 Asia-Pacific nations.

In this spirit, Taipei maker communities MakerPro and Fu-tureWard focus on the economic potentials of making. Both MakerPro and FutureWard are supported in part by gov-ernment funding, work closely with city and national gov-ernment agencies, and are well positioned to execute the agenda of the creative and cultural industries policy. Mak-erPro focuses on maker-to-entrepreneur pathways, provid-ing workshops, consulting, and networking opportunities. FutureWard operates on a membership dues model, but its


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1,000m2 facility is physically located on the campus of Ta-Tung University in central Taipei, and students use its facil-ities as part of their coursework. Interestingly, FutureWard also hosted a week-long hands-on workshop for a couple dozen employees of the Labor Department within the Tai-pei City Government in 2015, the purpose of which was to educate government employees about making.

The two ideologies of making outlined here—the culture and the economic framings—are often articulated by mak-ers as though they are in opposition. For example, OpenLab Taipei aligns itself with artistic maker practices and argues against making as a form of entrepreneurship; informants at places like MakerPro and FutureWard stress the need to realize making’s economic potential. These conflicting vi-sions of making are reflected in a hotly contested debate between two translations for “maker”: 自造者 vs. 創客. Both terms translate as “maker” but they have very differ-ent connotations. The first aligns itself with notions of the self-made, while the latter has strong connotations of entre-preneurship. Puppet master Chen uses the former, while the latter is common at MakerPro and FutureWard. Makers in different spaces use these different formulations both to articulate their individual identities and also affiliation with a normative stance about what making in Taiwan should be.

These two formulations of making are strongly and fre-quently asserted. But we noticed in our ethnographic work that clear ideological lines are blurrier in practice. For ex-ample, the same individuals who sharply criticize govern-ment policies—to the point of joining in major public demonstrations against them—nonetheless collaborate in spaces that are government subsidized; they collaborate with government officials; they participate as judges in government-sponsored competitions; they show up to and work in spaces with an entrepreneurial focus. It is also a credit to these government officials that they financially and professionally support makers who are publicly criticizing them. In short, there appears to be a sense of a shared enter-prise, but exactly what it is, and how it should be prioritized and perpetuated, is being actively and openly debated in a democratic way.

In their theory of global assemblages, Ong and Collier [58] stress the inability to reduce assemblages to a single logic, and we see that at work in the Taipei maker scene. Tai-wan’s take on creative and cultural industries helps explain this in part. All of the diverse maker sites are instances of the global “maker movement” in their (flexible) deploy-ment of maker technologies, tools, ethos, recruitment meth-ods, self-presentation tactics, sanctioned maker identities, and so on. Additionally, they all make credible arguments that they are operating broadly within objectives, principles, and values of the culture and creative industries policy, because they promote distinctively Taiwanese practices, styles, materials, and traditions (common practices at OpenLab and FabLab) and/or they contribute to Taiwan’s engineering and IT culture (common practices at MakerPro

and FutureWard). Many makers vocally disagree with the specific ways that the policy (in their view) subordinates cultural ends to economic ones, rather than the other way around. Others criticize the artistic crowd of failing to make a real impact (often understood in market terms). The gov-ernment appears to be willing to let both sides hold this debate and support them in diverse ways.

MOVE 2: ANTICIPATORY DESIGN We now turn to our second move, anticipatory design, in which fragmentary images—in our case, images of making from our empirical work—are used in a way analogous to how an archaeologist reconstructs past cultures from frag-ments of pots and houses left behind: to creatively and speculatively imagine the wholes that these fragments were part of. The difference is that whereas the archaeologist is attempting to construct a holistic understanding of an actual culture in the past, in this anticipatory design practice the holistic understanding is of a world not yet existing, but potentially worth pursuing. The anticipatory design practice is a method to study forms of life to discover and build on the glimmers of the utopian in them, however partial or imperfect they may be. These glimmers are then brought forward to form actionable aspirations and alternatives. Importantly, anticipatory design is not about assessing if a utopian project meets or fails to meet the standards of uto-pianism. Instead, feminist utopian sociologist Ruth Levitas writes of anticipatory design that it proposes “provisional hypotheses about how society might be” which are not in-tended as forecasts, but rather as invitations to “both writer and reader to imagine themselves, as well as the world, otherwise,” initially considered with “a suspension of disbe-lief” [45].

Applied to HCI’s relationship to making, anticipatory de-sign can support intervention within making to bring about participation and democracy in technology use and design. In this paper, we apply anticipatory design to our analysis of making as global assemblages, precisely to uncover con-crete and specific moments where technology appears to have been deployed, however provisionally or temporarily, in a utopian way. In collecting these moments, our goal is to contribute towards realizing the democratic potential of making, in which the empirical present is articulated as a vision of how it can be otherwise. We align our approach with work by Introna and Nissenbaum [38], pushing tech-nology towards more democratic outcomes. In the follow-ing pages, we use this approach to draw out utopian glim-mers from our ethnographic research in China and Taiwan.

Utopian Glimmers in China What started out with a single hackerspace in Shanghai in 2010 morphed into a complex sociopolitical project of “mass making” that spans industries and regions today: China currently is estimated to have more than 1,000 maker spaces, and a new national policy entitled “mass mak-erspace” (众创空间) that enrolls making into a much larger social, economic, and educational program aimed at trans-


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forming China from a manufacturing to a global knowledge economy. Within only 5 years, making in China has be-come part of a national policy and attracts foreign invest-ment. Intel has invested millions of USD in the South of China to support China’s “mass makerspace” initiative, and hundreds of makers-turned entrepreneurs from across the globe have traveled to China to realize their commercial Internet of Things product visions by partnering with local factories [47].

Much like elsewhere though, these activities started out much earlier, in part driven by the efforts of a few idealists [46,50], an eclectic collective of artists, social entrepreneurs, open source hardware geeks, and bloggers, active since 2007 and operating within tech companies, coworking spaces, makerspaces, and non-for profit organizations in China. Their underlying rationale was that by adopting the principles and values of the free culture movement, China’s society as a whole could be opened up so to enable individ-uals to explore alternative life- and workstyles, different from what the government or their parents’ generation had set out for them [46,50].

A sense of euphoria was central to these early projects; many believed that the values associated with the free cul-ture movement such as open source, peer production, and collaboration would lead to both individual and collective freedom, civic engagement, and economic transformation. It was a utopian project that coincided with the rise of Chi-nese social media such as Sina Weibo, celebrated as ena-blers of digital democracy and the birth of a new liberated citizen – the netizen (网民) [51, 80]. China was on the up-swing; with a rapidly swelling economy, it seemed almost immune to the 2008 economic crash. It was an enticing moment documented by China’s tech enthusiasts, interna-tional journalists and scholars alike [53].

Fast forward to 2015; the Chinese economy is witnessing a major slow-down with ripple effects in the global economy and stock market. Earlier visions of open sharing are now packaged under the banner of “mass innovation” or “mass making,” promoted by the government as the crux to get the economy back on track by turning citizens into entrepre-neurs, innovators, and makers. On first glance, the counter-culture from 2007 appears co-opted by capitalism with Chi-nese characteristics. Since President Xi Jinping took over office in 2012, arrests and central control over media outlets and digital media have reportedly increased [59, 78], while start-up culture and venture capital investment are encour-aged in ways comparable to the West [11, 30, 55].

And yet, to portray China’s maker scene as a story of co-opted counterculture would render invisible earlier and con-tinuous efforts by China’s makers to situate their work, neither outright against nor for the system [50]. A story of co-option would run the risk to critique these efforts, utopi-an they might be, as elitist or technologically deterministic. Our goal here, then, is to intervene and amplify the glimps-

es and moments of alternatives we observed in China’s maker culture, rather than shut them down. Here we deploy the utopian anticipatory design move to seek the materials of a preferable future in fragmentary form in the present.

Open Source & Partnership In 2007, Ricky Ye (叶琛) returned to Shanghai from gradu-ate school in England, where he had begun working on an open source robotics project with a group of fellow enthusi-asts distributed across Europe and China. Upon his return to China, Ye continued the work and began showcasing some of the early DIY robotics hacks in the Shanghai coworking space XinDanWei (新单位), which was at that time an im-portant meeting spot for advocates of the free culture movement in China. Today, Ricky Ye is the CEO of one of China’s most well-known open source hardware businesses: DFRobot. In some ways, DFRobot might be reminiscent of a typical Silicon Valley start-up success story. And yet, the ways DFRobot began and continues its operations offer an open source business model that differs from the more widespread Silicon Valley approach of creationist capital-ism [11]; DFRobot’s business model is structured around enabling hobbyist roboticists, newcomers to making as well as aspiring hardware start-ups to either expand their proto-typing skills and/or move into professional product devel-opment. The business is rooted in a model of partnership: DFRobot offers expertise in design for manufacturing, pro-totyping, and engineering, while hobbyist makers offer a continuous stream of ideas. Start-ups and hobbyists can build on the company’s open source hardware platforms, working with its designers and engineers to improve and expand both hardware and ideas. If one side decides to move into production, the revenue is shared.

This model of partnership, which might be better character-ized as peer-entrepreneurship than peer production, is fun-damentally different from the much more widespread ten-dency to exploit participants in technology production as contributors of free labor [11, 73]. This includes business models of prominent social media sites like Facebook, min-ing online behavior to sell it back its users in the form of advertisement, but also newer companies like MakerBot, which has productively leveraged its online community of enthusiastic contributors in order to gain reputation, free contributions and eventually economic value. In a 2014 keynote at the first featured Maker Faire in Shenzhen, Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired Magazine and now CEO of 3DRobotics articulated this business model as follows: “This is really the main asset of the maker movement… it creates a community of enthusiastic people who share for free. Our company has hundreds of developers around the world, who we don’t have to pay or to hire, because we have created a place where they can feel part of some-thing… how do we reward them? We teach them. How do we pay them? With a coffee mug! If they commit code, we give them a t-shirt. They love that, because it’s an official recognition of their contribution.” Open source, here, is rendered as a business model that rests on low-paid or even


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free labor. It recalls what Gina Neff [55] has termed “ven-ture labor” where people began to “think of their jobs as an investment or as having a future pay-off other than regular wages.” Similarly, here, Anderson bets on the fact that “hundreds of developers around the world” are offering their know-how and expertise in exchange for “feeling part of something.”

DFRobot offers an alternative. It is not a big step or a revo-lutionary program. It is a pragmatic business model, aimed at making revenue and not at overthrowing existing struc-tures of state control or the global processes of capitalism. It also remains a fairly exclusive project; reserved to those who can afford to traverse in international start-up land or engage in hobbyist production. It is not a revolutionary tool for the masses of workers on the factory floor. And yet, its underlying business tactic is exactly what makes it an alter-native worth exploring; in contrast to companies like Mak-erBot, DFRobot demonstrates that open source hardware can be part of a successful business model. It is a hint of utopia practiced within (not against) a capitalist mode. DFRobot’s business model firmly incorporates the ideals of many open source hardware enthusiasts – peer production and open sharing of knowledge, code and other resources – extending them into business: the sharing of profit and rev-enue or peer-entrepreneurship. We do not mean to imply, here, that DFRobot stands for some kind of authentic Chi-nese utopianism that would be intrinsically better than pro-jects in the US or elsewhere. Rather, DFRobot’s story al-lows us to show how a utopian alternative materialized as an economic model in a place typically associated with tight state control and authoritarianism. The DFRobot case, in other words, makes visible what Suchman has called “the multiplicity of places in which different but also potentially related future-making practices occur” [Suchman in: 25].

With this account from China, we aim to offer two particu-lar take-aways: First, the opportunity of peer-entrepreneurship. We have outlined earlier in this paper that China’s makers (like those working at DFRobot) reframe Chinese manufacturing in the global imaginary as a partner in both design and production. The tagline of China’s first featured Maker Faire in 2014, for instance, was “Innovate with China,” used to demonstrate that Chinese manufactur-ing can mean something else than copycat or low quality production. The business model of DFRobot is organized around this ambition to position manufacturing as partner in innovation. A possible stance that follows for HCI is to envision ways to engage in such partnerships during re-search and design. HCI has a long tradition of partnering with industry; however, this involves mostly large interna-tional corporations such as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and so on. What would a partnership look like with a small open source hardware business like DFRobot? Possible outcomes could include the developing of open hardware platforms for education and design research, and the idea-tion of alternative economic models that might also be tak-en up by larger corporations and educational institutions.

Thinking about research impact in terms of business and market has been explored peripherally in HCI, but becomes pressing as HCI visions and approaches from participatory design to ubiquitous computing are commodified [5].

Second, DFRobot shows that innovative forms of entrepre-neurship within a capitalist framework do not have to be antithetical to critical intervention. This observation extends a body of work in HCI that has challenged the sharp dis-tinction between critical design and affirmative design [6]. Looking for moments of critical intervention in entrepre-neurship can be productive for HCI to expand its critical scholarship beyond the confined circles of people who can afford attend conferences like ACM CHI.

Utopian Glimmers in the Taipei Maker Scene In its many makerspaces, with free or inexpensive access to cutting edge tools and skilled communities to support their use, Taiwan replicates one of the major democratizing tac-tics of the global maker movement. What makes it specifi-cally Taiwanese? Taiwan in general, and in its maker scene, is engaged in a kind of dialectic. On the one hand is the threat to its existence as an autonomous nation-state—hardly a utopian source—which has the silver lining of cre-ating solidarity among Taiwan’s people in spite of their other divisions: a solidarity that is committed to its demo-cratic way of life, to presenting a coherent picture of itself to the rest of the world, and to perpetuating all of the above in future generations. On the other hand is its internal het-erogeneity and divisions, the bitter debates concerning its relationship with China, whether people are “Taiwanese” or “Chinese from Taiwan,” whether the history of China or the island of Taiwan should be taught in schools, and so forth.

The meaning of making is among other things a proxy con-versation for this dialectic. Makers are thrown together as a community by the global maker movement, including its organizational, technical, and ideological apparatuses. Tai-pei’s makers are eager to convince others of the potentials of making, but they are also divided about what those po-tentials are. Is making a life skill through which one enacts and perpetuates cultural citizenship? Is it a professional skill through which one contributes to the national econo-my? Can making contribute to the commodification of Tai-wan as a style or brand in the global marketplace or encour-age tourism? Common to all of these questions is a focus on collective, rather than individual, interest. We saw no evi-dence of making pitched as a way for an individual to “get ahead” or to expressing oneself creatively. The collective tended not to be framed in terms of fellow makers, either, but of all Taiwan, present and future. Again, we believe that collective interest may have something to do with the sense of threat shared by Taiwan’s citizens, and perhaps more broadly by collectivist tendencies in Asian culture. Regard-less, making is pursued in Taiwan as a technology of the national self, as a collection of national self-making tech-niques organized by a social vision.


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But it is also important to stress the democratic nature of this process. There is no authority in charge of making in Taiwan, no one institution that has the power to decide how it unfolds. The makers see themselves as ambassadors of the global maker movement, but as we have seen they offer different interpretations of its significances and potentials for Taiwan. Both national and city governments also have an interest in making, because of its potentials for creative and cultural industries, which they are eager to promote. Policymakers have framed this policy in more market-driven terms than many of makers like. Yet the government has supported strands of making that would seem to yield little hope of impact on strictly market terms. Taipei seems to be testing, through trial and variation, many forms and ideologies of making to see which ones stick.

One of our informants, an entrepreneur born in Hong Kong who earned graduate design degrees at an Ivy League uni-versity before returning to Asia, told us that he decided to open up his making consultancy and design business in Taipei, rather than Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Shenzhen for two reasons: he felt that Taiwanese engineers were inex-pensive relative to their ability, and that Taiwan was the only free Chinese society in the world. This combination was promising, he said, because it meant that high quality startups would be less expensive in Taipei than elsewhere, and because the freedoms of a democratic society meant that their creativity would be unfettered. For this entrepre-neur, Taiwan’s freedom is not merely a political ideal; it serves in an epistemic capacity, as a condition of possibility for heightened creative practice.

Taiwan’s maker scene is functioning today as a workshop for discovering ways that a democratized technology can contribute to a social vision of a lasting, self-sufficient, and sovereign society, yet divided, even extremely divided, on what that vision should entail and how to bring it into be-ing. A key mechanism of this project—in whichever of its many forms it is construed—is that the democratization of technology via making is seen as a national need. We never heard in Taiwan, as we have in the U.S., the relatively pas-sive approach to recruiting participation in making, “our doors are open and everyone is welcome.” Instead, there are diverse tactics of taking making to the public: by placing it in a university and requiring students to use it; putting mak-er tools and kits on 500 trucks and driving them out to rural communities in Taiwan [75]; inviting the public to free workshops on entrepreneurship; updating and reinvigorat-ing everyday Taiwanese cultural practices, such as puppet opera, via making; bringing in policy makers to makerspac-es and teaching them to make; and by the government pub-licly embracing and supporting conflicting forms and ideo-logies of making, even when those very makers take to the streets to attack those same policies.

The utopian glimmer is our amplification of the point that the Hong Kong-based entrepreneur raised: the idea that democracy can serve in an epistemic capacity to intensify

creative potential at scale. Specifically, we see the union of the cultural value of collectivism merging productively with the democratic value of policy supportive of and also in-formed by robust debate. The debate allows for the prolif-eration of alternative visions and models of making and maker practices, as we saw in the debate between making as cultural work vs. making as entrepreneurial work. The collectivism orients making towards a common good, rather than an individual good; in other words, the development of distinctively Taiwanese practices of making is oriented to-wards a national future—be it economic, pedagogical, or cultural. Meanwhile, government agencies do not sit on the sidelines but actively participate, both materially and sym-bolically supporting divergent maker groups and ideologies, even as they make their own priorities known (e.g., to stim-ulate economic growth and to promote Taiwan’s creative and cultural life). We thus understand democracy serving in an epistemic capacity to support collective creativity at scale in the context of Taiwanese making as follows: it en-tails a model that robustly allows for heterogeneous exper-iments in peer-based innovation, which both influences and is influenced by government agencies, and which contrib-utes towards an evolving conception of the public good.

DISCUSSION This paper began with the articulation of one of making’s central commitments – the democratization of technology production. Making gives new appeal to HCI’s own long-held values and commitments to user participation; making challenges whether there is (or needs to be) a gap between designers and engineers on the one hand, and between de-signers and end users on the other. Making also raises ques-tions about computing itself. It challenges the long-standard view that end users manipulate software but not hardware. Making and HCI, in other words, are not separate phenom-ena but instead mutually implicated. And yet, while HCI has pursued making as an avenue to increase participation, HCI research has also critiqued that there is an underlying technosolutionism to making, i.e. technology is seen as so-lution for social, economic and political problems. One feature of the technosolutionist vision is that it tends to treat making as an undifferentiated global form. Such a reduction abstracts out the local work in diverse sites. Following an-thropologists of the global, we have argued that it is in the specific instances of global forms where possibilities of making are developed and realized.

Throughout the paper, we have articulated preferable fu-tures, rooted in a critique of the present, to offer a way out of the dilemma of HCI as it both contributes to and cri-tiques making’s utopian vision. We now return to the ques-tion we posed up front: Could we blend the contributions of technologists who are opening up making to new uses and users with the contributions of critical voices to pursue the democratization of making as an equally sociotechnical research practice? What we have hopefully demonstrated throughout this paper is that the answer to this question is


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yes, but it demands a reflexive-interventionist move, which we characterize as “democratizing from within.”

HCI: Democratizing from within As scientists, we HCI researchers often view ourselves as outside observers of computational domains of interest. Such a view is disadvantageous not only because it does not acknowledge our own participation in such domains—via the development of tools, the framing of research issues, and the marshaling of resources—but it is also self-disempowering. HCI researchers share in many ways mak-ing’s utopian vision to democratize technology. This, we believe, creates an opportunity and obligation to pursue the democratization of maker assemblages and do so through approaches we outlined in this paper – a critique of the pre-sent and anticipatory design. In many obvious ways, we already do this. When HCI technologists develop a new tool to support making, we introduce at least the potentiality for the democratic uptake of that tool. When HCI social scien-tists help us understand a collaborative behavior, such that we can better support it, we introduce at least the potentiali-ty for democratic empowerment. But there are more subtle ways that we do (or at least could). In naming and framing making as an object of inquiry, we ourselves end up re-sourcing, judging, championing, inhibiting (and so forth) making. When we understand the projects and materials that appear in MAKE Magazine or at Maker Faires as ex-emplars of making, this is not an innocent description. When we justify making research because it stimulates economies or functions as a crowdsourced laboratory of the Internet of Things, this is not an innocent description. In each case we are contributing to the discursive formula-tion—and to the assemblaging—of making. This is a form of agency, of power/knowledge [27], that we have.

If we view ourselves as implicated in global assemblages of making, what power does that grant us as actors to contrib-ute towards the democratization of computing? We argue that it might inhere in our field’s ability to engage technol-ogies and situated actions at the same time, i.e., to perceive how technologies do and do not democratize. Put another way, a given technology or social formation can be directed towards more versus less democratic outcomes. We need a stance, then, that acknowledges and augments our agency to push towards more rather than less democratic outcomes.

Making inevitably poses opportunities and challenges for the democratization of computing. If technologies are ex-pensive, difficult to use, or if their functionalities or aesthet-ics speak to some ways of life more than others, they can inhibit widespread use. It was Leah Buechley’s insight that Arduino seemed to resonate with men more than women, and she sought to redesign it in a way that would resonate more with women [14]. But this is not just a technological issue. If individuals cannot see themselves in an existing collective, they will not join it. If laws make certain forms of making difficult or impossible, they also affect who makes, and what they make [61]. Clearly the mantra “eve-

ryone can be a maker” is optimistic—certain kinds of mak-ers and making are encouraged or discouraged based on the spaces, ecologies, networks, and discourses in which mak-ing is construed as a reflexive practice.

In this last point there is a role for HCI researchers: to lev-erage our empirical accounts of maker practices in a utopi-an analysis to identify those specific and situated democra-tizing forms and bring them back into the global conversa-tion. In this paper, we showed how making in China can thrive using labor partnerships instead of exploitative labor relations, and can, despite its business-focus, also pursue and achieve critical outcomes. As we showed in Taiwan, making can be democratically debated and diversely pur-sued without becoming so individualistic that it loses its political capacity to democratize technology as part of a more ambitious social project. Taken together, these two maker scenes demonstrate that the democratizing potential of making can occur not only by empowering individuals (i.e., as often articulated in the West), but also by empower-ing collectives—maker groups, entire cities, even nations—to pursue their collective goals in and through making.

What is needed, then, in research on making is a reflexive-interventionist stance, if HCI is to pursue the democratiza-tion of technology in a sociotechnical way. In its reflexivi-ty, it seeks to account for, and be accountable to, our posi-tions as actors in the computing arenas we research and design for. In its interventionism, it seeks to give substance and new resources to the pursuit of democratization beyond technosolutionism. In our practice, we have sought to de-center our own HCI theoretical predispositions as Western academics by engaging in making praxis in Shenzhen and Taipei. We have sought to acknowledge and celebrate the technological achievements that have created so much po-tential to empower people to design hardware. But we have sought also to understand the sociopolitical, legal, national, urban, and ideological contexts in which these technologies are deployed, to reveal in them glimmers of democratiza-tion that are not part of the global currency. Out of those glimmers, we seek to fashion new practices, models, tech-nologies that could be used to augment and amplify their democratizing potentials.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank all of our participants, as well as Morgan Ames, Seyram Avle, Marissa Cohen, Jean Hardy, Cindy Lin, Stefanie Wuschitz for comments on drafts. We also thank long-term research collaborators and commentators Paul Dourish, Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber, Anna Greenspan, Ted Hung, Lyn Jeffery, David Li, Pei-Ying Lin, C.H. (Mach) Ma, Eric Pan, Ricky Ye, 陳伯健, 何偉光, 歐敏銓, 楊育修, and鄭鴻旗. This work was supported in part by the Na-tional Science Foundation under awards 1513596, 1321065, and 1513604, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, and Participatory Information Technology (PIT) at Aarhus University.


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